Our programming languages suck at providing useful types. "String" is a structural data type. "SQL query" and "HTML snippet" and "regular expression" and "use

Our programming languages suck at providing useful types. "String" is a structural data type. "SQL query" and "HTML snippet" and "regular expression" and "user-entered text" are semantic types which can be stored in strings, but are all quite distinct in meaning and usage. You shouldn't be allowed (by the language's type system) to pass user-entered text to a SQL query function, without perhaps first calling a function with a scary name like "convert_raw_unsafe_text_to_query". A string is not a string is not a string. Or make a DOM-for-SQL so we never have to touch syntactic strings. (It's exactly the same problem as units of measure. 5.0 feet is not the same type as 5.0 meters, and you shouldn't be able to add 5.0 + 5.0 if you didn't declare they have matching units, or define a way to convert as necessary. Numeric types in most languages don't have associated units, either, unfortunately.) Hungarian notation tried to partially solve this, by giving up on the built-in type system and using variable names to encode intent. That solution is ugly so it's been abandoned, and it's the wrong place to solve it, anyway. Programming languages today don't provide appropriate abstract data types for strings, or make it easy to define your own. Popular libraries for SQL/HTML/regex/etc don't require special string types. Since there's no standard types, it'd be a pain for any users who need to use more than one library, too. We need either one popular language to do this (which others might then copy), or two popular libraries (a coalition). It also needs a catchy name for this style of programming, to help shame old languages/libraries that don't support it.